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14 POLICY • Vol. 31 No. 2 • Winter 2015
NEW FEMINISM’S WAR ON WOMEN
for Her.’ They’re a weird mix of self-help and sassy
broad: Germaine Greer meets Oprah Winfrey
meets Frank McCourt; part misery memoir, part
feministic tract. These books devote much of their
content to slagging off women. Women who shave
too much, preen too much, who’ve had plastic
surgery, who’ve obviously been brainwashed by
porno culture or pop culture. In other words, they
don’t know their own minds, and thus they need the
help of the more spiritual New Feminists, who are
heroically immune to their cultural surroundings
and are therefore pure, insightful, ready to
re-educate the rest of us, women and men alike.
So the New Feminism represents, not a war on
men, but a massive insult to women. It’s a really
dangerous reversal of the enormous gains that
have been made for womankind over the past
hundred years. Women have won the right to vote,
the right to work, they were increasingly being
seen as autonomous, just as capable and free-willed
as men. Now that’s all being undone by the New
Feminism, which has pushed a view of women as
fragile, always unsafe, lacking free will, incapable
of making autonomous choices due to the
suffocating culture
The Victorian view of women is making a
comeback. In the Victorian era, women were
often protected from certain printed material
which society, or their chaperones, considered
unfit for them—now New Feminists seek to
protect ‘women and girls’ from Page 3 or gangsta
rap. In the Victorian era there were numerous
campaigns designed to protect women from street
harassment. The Lady Magazine, in the late 1800s,
ran a campaign called ‘Protection of Women,’
which depicted the rough, ugly public sphere as
unsuitable for women. That idea is coming back
too. And one of the key arguments made in the
nineteenth century against allowing women to
attend university was that their dainty minds
would be assaulted by too much controversial
matter and by dodgy male behaviour. Today, it’s
New Feminists who claim university is unsafe
for women, everywhere from the library, with its
shocking books, to the university square, with
its lads or frats.
But I think even this is not the full story. Even
calling the New Feminism a war on women doesn’t
tell us everything. Because while the New Feminism
most openly undermines women’s standing in
society, it also represents an attack on humanist,
liberal values, on modern Enlightened ideals. The
New Feminism is at the cutting edge of undermining
the key ideals of free, democratic societies.
In the sphere of Knowledge, for example, New
Feminist ideas have played a key role in questioning
whether the truth is really discoverable and
depicting rationalism and reason as cold, ‘male’
values. The ideal of democracy is being undermined
by the so-called feminisation of politics, the
notion that we must drain politics of its edge, its
argumentativeness—the lifeblood of democracy—
and instead make it more consensual. The idea of
justice is threatened by New Feminist ideas: the
limiting of tough cross-examination in the name of
protecting rape claimants in particular, and the use
of kangaroo courts on Western campuses to punish
alleged sexual offenders, speaks to the diminution
of the idea of justice as something rigorous, fair,
and open.
The values of the modern Enlightened age are
being undermined by the New Feminism. But
this is not down to some evil cabal of high-heeled
feminists who have set out to destroy modern
society. Rather, Western society itself has lost
faith in those values, over the past few decades,
and it is constantly looking about for a new idea
or campaign through which it might make its
abandonment of those values look like something
progressive rather than regressive. New Feminism
is its latest campaign, the new means though which
a disoriented, post-Enlightened West now jettisons
its values of liberty, democracy, justice, knowledge,
and autonomy, under the cynical guise of ‘helping
women.’ And girls.
The ideal of democracy is being
undermined by the so-called feminisation
of politics, the notion that we must drain
politics of its edge.